The Swerve (44 page)

 

8
and the quotes that follow: Ibid., pp. 110, 154, 160.

 

9
The copies Niccoli made of a substantial number of ancient texts have survived and are in the San Marco collection to which he willed his library. These include, in addition to the Lucretius, works by Plautus, Cicero, Valerius Flaccus, Celsus, Aulus Gellius, Tertullian, Plutarch, and Chrysostom. Others—including the copy of Asconius Pedianus mentioned by
Poggio—are
lost. See B. L. Ullman and Philip A. Stadter,
The Public Library of Renaissance Florence. Niccolò Niccoli, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Library of San Marco
(Padua: Antenore, 1972), p. 88.

 

10
Gordan,
Two Renaissance Book Hunters
, pp. 147, 166–67.

 

11
As Lauro Martines notes, power and wealth had shifted in the thirteenth century from the old feudal nobility to the merchant class, to families like the Albizzi, Medici, Rucellai, and Strozzi. But, though not any longer very wealthy, the bride’s father was reasonably prosperous. “In 1427 Vaggia’s father, Gino, claimed one large house with a courtyard and shop, two cottages, four farms, various land parcels, and some livestock. His remaining assets included an outstanding credit of 858 florins and government bonds with a market value of 118 florins. Altogether his gross capital came to 2424 florins. The debts on this estate amounted to 500 florins, and rental and subsistence deductions reduced Gino’s taxable capital to 336 florins. Consequently, Poggio’s match with Vaggia was hardly contracted with an eye (on his part) to forming an alliance with a moneyed family. Nevertheless, she brought him a dowry whose value, 600 florins, conformed with the dowries customarily given by the political families of medium stature, or by the distinguished old families (somewhat down at heel) whose major social virtue was their blood”—Lauro Martines,
The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 1390–1460
, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 211–12.

 

12
William Shepherd,
Life of Poggio Bracciolini
(Liverpool: Longman et al., 1837), p. 394.

 

13
Quoted in Charles Trinkaus,
In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought
, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 1:268.

 

CHAPTER TEN: SWERVES

 

1
Quoted in Alison Brown,
The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 49. Cf. Girolamo Savonarola,
Prediche sopra Amos e Zacaria
, no. 3 (February 19, 1496), ed. Paolo Ghiglieri (Rome: A. Belardetti, 1971), 1:79–81. See also Peter Godman,
From Poliziano to Machiavelli: Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998),
p
. 140, and Jill Kraye, “The Revival of Hellenistic Philosophies,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy
, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 102–6.

 

2
On Machiavelli’s Lucretius manuscript, see Brown,
Return of Lucretius
, pp. 68–87, and Appendix, pp. 113–22.

 

3
See James Hankins, “Ficino’s Theology and the Critique of Lucretius,” forthcoming in the proceedings of the conference on
Platonic Theology: Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance
, held at the Villa I Tatti and the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, Florence, April 26–27, 2007.

 

4
On the controversy, see Salvatore I. Camporeale, “Poggio Bracciolini contro Lorenzo Valla. Le ‘Orationes in L. Vallam,’” in
Poggio Bracciolini, 1380–1980
(Florence: Sansoni, 1982), pp. 137–61. On the whole problem of orthodoxy in Valla (and Ficino as well), see Christopher S. Celenza’s illuminating
The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 80–114.

 

5
“Nunc sane video, cur in quodam tuo opusculo, in quo Epicureorum causam quantam datur tutaris, vinum tantopere laudasti … Bacchum compotatoresque adeo profuse laudans, ut epicureolum quendam ebrietatis assertorem te esse profitearis … Quid contra virginitatem insurgis, quod numquam fecit Epicurus? Tu prostitutas et prostibula laudas, quod ne gentiles quidem unquam fecerunt. Non verbis oris tui sacrilegi labes, sed igne est expurganda, quem spero te non evasurum.” Cited in Don Cameron Allen, “The Rehabilitation of Epicurus and His Theory of Pleasure in the Early Renaissance,”
Studies in Philology
41 (1944), pp. 1–15.

 

6
Valla directly quotes Lucretius, but only passages he could have found in Lactantius and other Christian texts.

 

7
Indeed that spokesman, not a fictional character but the contemporary poet Maffeo Vegio, makes it clear that even he is not really an Epicurean, but that he is willing to play the role of a defender of pleasure in order to refute Stoical arguments for virtue as the highest good that, in his view, represent a far more serious threat to Christian orthodoxy.

 

8
Lorenzo Valla,
De vero falsoque bono/On Pleasure
, trans. A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella Lorch (New York: Abaris Books, 1977), p. 319. I will use the better known title,
De voluptate
, throughout.

The text of Valla’s in question actually deploys several different strategies in addition to dialogical disavowal to protect its author from the charge of Epicureanism. Valla has good grounds then for indignantly rejecting Poggio’s charge of Epicureanism. The Epicurean arguments that take up the entire second book of
De voluptate
and much of the first are carefully framed by proper Christian doctrines, doctrines that the narrator and the other interlocutors unanimously declare have carried the day.

 

9
Valla,
De voluptate
, pp. 219–21.

 

10
Ibid., p. 221.

 

11
Ibid., p. 295.

 

12
Cf. Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion,” in
Glyph
8 (1981), pp. 40–61.

 

13
See Michele Marullo,
Inni Naturali
(Florence: Casa Editrice le Lettere, 1995); on Bruno and Epicureanism, see, among other works, Hans Blumenberg,
The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983; orig.
Die Legitimität der Neuzeit
, 1966).

 

14
“L’anima è sol … in un pan bianco caldo un pinocchiato”—Brown,
Return of Lucretius
, p. 11.

 

15
Erasmus, “The Epicurean,” in
The Colloquies of Erasmus
, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 538, 542. On Erasmus’s criticism of Marullo, see P. S. Allen,
Opus Epistolarum des. Erasmi Roterodami
, 12 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906–58), 2:187; 5:519, trans. in
Collected Works of Erasmus
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–), 3:225; 10:344.
Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation
, ed. P. G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 2:398–99.

 

16
Cited in More,
Utopia
, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; rev. edn. 2002), p. 68.

 

17
More plays a characteristically brilliant and self-conscious game in
Utopia
with the complex factors that led ancient texts to survive or perish, including the role of accident: “When about to go on the fourth voyage,” Hythloday remarks, “I put on board, in place of wares to sell, a fairly large package of books, having made up my mind never to return rather than to come back soon. They received from me most of Plato’s works, several of Aristotle’s, as well as Theophrastus on plants, which I regret to say was mutilated in parts. During the voyage an ape found the book, left lying carelessly about, and in wanton sport tore out and destroyed several pages in various sections,” p. 181.

 

18
At the time I am writing this essay, in the United States one out of every nine African Americans aged twenty to thirty-five is incarcerated, while the United States has achieved the greatest disparity in wealth of any time in the past century.

 

19
Ingrid D. Rowland,
Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), pp. 17–18, translating
Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante
, 1, part 3, in
Dialoghi Italiani
, ed. Giovanni Gentile (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), pp. 633–37.

 

20
Walter L. Wakefield, “Some Unorthodox Popular Ideas of the Thirteenth Century,” in
Medievalia et Humanistica
, p. 28.

 

21
John Edwards, “Religious Faith and Doubt in Late Medieval Spain: Soria circa 1450–1500,” in
Past and Present
120 (1988), p. 8.

 

22
Giordano Bruno,
The Ash Wednesday Supper
, ed. and trans. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1977), p. 91.

 

23
Jacopo Corbinelli, the Florentine secretary to Queen Mother Catherine de Medicis, cited in Rowland,
Giordano Bruno
, p. 193.

 

24
Ash Wednesday Supper
, p. 87.

 

25
De l’Infinito, Universo e Mondi
, Dialogue Quinto, in
Dialoghi Italiani
, pp. 532–33, citing
De rerum natura
, 2:1067–76.

 

26
See J. W. Shirley, ed.,
Thomas Harriot: Renaissance Scientist
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) and Shirley,
Thomas Harriot: A Biography
(Oxford
: Clarendon Press, 1983); J. Jacquot, “Thomas Harriot’s Reputation for Impiety,”
Notes and Records of the Royal Society
9 (1951–2), pp. 164–87.

 

27
Ash Wednesday Supper
, p. 90.

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN: AFTERLIVES

 

1
A famous exception was the inquisitorial investigation of Paolo Veronese for his 1573 depiction of the Last Supper, whose intense materiality—the swirling life, the food on the table, the dogs scratching and scrounging for scraps, and so forth—triggered accusations of irreverence and even heresy. Veronese avoided unpleasant consequences by renaming the work
The Feast in the House of Levi
.

 

2
Jonson wrote his name on the title page and, tiny as the book is—only 11 by 6 centimeters—he made many marks and jottings in the margins, evidence of an attentive and engaged reading. He seems to have been particularly struck by the passage in book 2 in which Lucretius denies that the gods have any interest in the behavior of mortals. At the foot of the page, he penned a translation of two of the lines:

 

Far above grief & dangers, those blest powers,

Rich in their active goods, need none of ours.

 

Cf. 2:649–50:

 

Nam privati dolori omni, privata periclis,

ipsa suis pollens opibus, nil indiga nostri.

 

Lucy Hutchinson translates the lines as follows:

 

The devine nature doth it selfe possesse

Eternally in peacefull quiettnesse,

Nor is concernd in mortall mens affairs,

Wholly exempt from dangers, griefes, and cares,

Rich in it selfe, of us no want it hath.

 

3
The Complete Essays of Montaigne
, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), pp. 846, 240.

 

4
Ibid., p. 318.

 

5
Ibid., p. 397.

 

6
Ibid., p. 310.

 

7
The quotations that follow are from ibid., pp. 464, 634, and 664.

 

8
Ibid., p. 62.

 

9
Ibid., p. 65.

 

10
M. A. Screech,
Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius: A Transcription and Study of the Manuscript, Notes, and Pen-Marks
(Geneva: Droz, 1998).

 

11
“
Ut sunt diuersi atomorum motus non incredibile est sic conuenisse olim atomos aut conuenturas ut alius nascatur montanus
.”—Ibid., p. 11. I have altered Screech’s translation: “Since the movements of the atoms are so varied, it is not unbelievable that the atoms once came together, or will together again in the future, so that another Montaigne be born.”

 

12
Trevor Dadson, “Las bibliotecas de la nobleza: Dos inventarios y un librero, año de 1625,” in Aurora Egido and José Enrique Laplana, eds.,
Mecenazgo y Humanidades en tiempos de Lastanosa. Homenaje a la memoria de Domingo Ynduráin
(Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2008), p. 270. I am grateful to Professor Dadson’s research into Spanish library inventories for all of the glimpses of Lucretius in post-Tridentine Spain.